Fragments
by nonyvole
Summary: Drabbles and one-shots. All movies, with some comics mixed in.
1. Chapter 1

Some comic canon here.

* * *

It's not hard to keep secrets. When you're the director of a highly-classified, quasi-militaristic intelligence agency, secrets aren't just things whispered about in corners, they're a way of life.

So covering up things becomes far too easy. Especially when it's personal.

Like pain. There's something about it – a constant dull ache interspersed with sharp, stabbing red-hot irons lancing through his head – that makes Nick Fury not want to get up in the morning sometimes. Some days it's easier to just pull the covers over his head and pretend that the outside world doesn't exist. Then the phone rings or his alarm goes off, responsibility comes crashing back in, and he blindly gropes for the bottle of painkillers he keeps next to his bed.

He's worked hard to cover it all up, but there are days when he emerges from his quarters, mentally daring anybody to say anything to him until the drugs have had a chance to kick in. Those days, Hill just gives him a _look_ and Fury knows that something – the set of his shoulders, that muscle that occasionally twitches in his jaw – gave him away. So he just looks back at her with a small nod and a quiet "Good morning, Agent Hill," and watches as she turns around and continues to make sure that everything runs smoothly for another hour, until he feels that he won't feed into the desire to share the pain with anybody who talks with him. Or even looks at him funny, or breathes too loudly.

The doctors are the only ones who truly know what goes on in his head with the pain, and that's only because Fury ends up in their clutches once or twice a year. Any shrapnel that's still present has been there for decades now, slowly working its way around his eyeball, and that's what they say causes all of the problems. It's almost become a game by now: the doctors offer to simply remove his eye since he doesn't use the miniscule vision left in it anyways, and he harangues them into just giving him a year's supply of Tylenol and ibuprofen because his eyepatch works just fine, and he's not going under the knife unless it's a life-or-death situation. They compromise with numbing eye drops that he'll use when the pain hits the point where he's almost – _almost_ – agreeing to the surgery.

But he'll be damned before he lets them cut anything out of his body that he wasn't born with, so Fury just hides it all. The pain always dulls, always retreats to the very back of his awareness to the point where he's able to ignore it and go about keeping the world safe.

He's a spy. He's had practice at hiding everything, after all, even from himself.


	2. Chapter 2

Iron Man 3 spoilers. Many thanks to everybody at The Beta Branch.

* * *

He'd kept his word. Pepper had been made better, he'd gotten rid of the arc reactor, and he hadn't built another suit.

Not that Tony didn't want to, sometimes.

He still consulted with SHIELD, if they asked, but ever since New York it simply wasn't the same. Agent – Phil – had somehow made the difference. Tony didn't know why, but suspected it was just something in the man's personality and demeanor.

He knew that he was hurting Pepper with how stubborn he was being about the fact that he still was having nightmares and flashbacks, but he really couldn't trust anybody but his closest friends not to betray him. Rhodey was off being Iron Patriot – still a stupid name – and he didn't want to burden Pepper with too much, not when she was having nightmares of her own. Bruce, for all his saying that "I'm not that type of doctor, Tony," and his occasional bursts of anger, was actually one of the better listeners.

Even if Bruce fell asleep most of the time.

Then, one day, his world fell apart. Again.

It was a normal consulting visit to the Helicarrier. As he was crossing the hanger deck to the Quinjet, he saw _him_. Agent. Phil.

He looked surprisingly good for a dead man.

"Sir? Mister Stark?" The voice at his elbow made him jump. "Everything okay?"

"…he's not dead. Why is he not dead, he was stabbed through the chest and we were told he was dead?" Tony knew he was babbling, but that was normal enough. Keeping his voice calm and the anxiety at bay, that was harder.

"Agent Coulson? No, he isn't. It's all very secretive." Too much excitement in the kid's voice. Tony thought about trying to find out more, but…no.

He wasn't surprised. Not completely, knowing what Tony knew about what really happened at SHIELD. Suddenly, he was glad that there were no more suits. No suits meant no Iron Man. No Tony Stark in the Avengers Initiative. "Sir?" This kid was getting annoying.

He'd made the mistake once of letting Phil get too close.

Pepper, Rhodey, and Bruce. Tony stared at the hanger deck and started walking again, ignoring his name being called out by a voice that was painfully familiar. Nobody else. He'd just end up betrayed again.


	3. Chapter 3

Happy Birthday, Steve Rogers.

* * *

Steve braced himself against the rocking of the subway as he slouched further into his seat. It was mostly empty, just him and a harried mother attempting to calm her fussing child. His hands convulsively clenched around the box that some dark-suited SHIELD agent had shoved at him as he was – finally – allowed to leave the building where they'd been keeping him and trying to acclimate him to the fact that it was 2012, not 1944.

He had hated it.

It wasn't the idea that the world had changed so much. It wasn't the idea that everybody he knew was dead or _old_. It wasn't even the idea that he wasn't allowed to leave the building, and his days were very carefully scheduled.

It was that everybody treated him like some relic, some…_thing_ that could fall apart as soon as you spit on it. People walked up to him just to stare, and then hurried off. Somebody even had the gall to ask for his autograph, calling him the biggest hero the world had ever seen. Sure, Steve had given it to the kid – and how that kid was even allowed to work for these people, he looked like he should have been in high school still – Steve didn't know.

The sound of the child's cries changed, and Steve glanced over. The child had gone from its mother's lap to the floor, and its mother was just shaking her head with a smile. Standing up, she grabbed the child's hand and slowly started moving to the door. Glancing out the window, Steve held back his sigh. He'd accidentally gotten on the wrong subway, so while it was going to Brooklyn, it was taking longer than his other options. They'd just crossed the East River.

Taking another look at the address on the envelope holding the keys to his new apartment, Steve had to wonder just how SHIELD had managed it. And why. He was perfectly agreeable to visiting the gym a mile away, even if it had all sorts of things that he was still trying to figure out how to use. Finally letting himself inside the building, he gently lowered the box of papers to the floor. "That's why." His voice startled him, and he had to laugh at how jumpy he was. A gym that he was much more comfortable with than what was at SHIELD met his eyes, and he slowly walked around, smelling the chalk dust and worn leather, the scents of countless men – and women, he reminded himself – that had worked out here over the years.

Suddenly eager, he grabbed the box and headed for the stairs. If the people at SHIELD had been able to find him _this,_ he was suddenly feeling encouraged that they wouldn't simply stick him in a place where he couldn't even figure out the lights. Climbing the steps two at a time, Steve balanced the box on his hip and unlocked the door to his new home. Opening it, he laughed again.

It wasn't home, but he thought that one day, it could be.


	4. Chapter 4

Going undercover. Thanks to the folks at The Beta Branch.

* * *

Natasha was never sure just why cigarettes never affected her, but part of her rejoiced at the fact – there were some things that you just needed to hide behind a cigarette for. Not having to go through withdrawal after a long mission was a definite bonus.

The one thing she couldn't stand was the lingering taste in the back of her throat. When she was deep undercover and part of her cover was being a chain smoker, the taste lingered for _days_. But…it was all part of the job. And right now, her job was to extract information. Lives depended on it.

Reluctantly reaching for a pair of scissors, she took a long look in the bathroom mirror. Whoever had decided that she needed to use this particular hairstyle, Natasha decided, needed to be put out of their misery. Carefully cutting along imaginary lines, she started neatening up the shaved patch on the side of her head. It was all part of the job, she told herself. Smoking, odd haircuts, and late nights out at clubs, all with the goal of discovering more on a human trafficking ring. At least this one didn't require her to integrate with druggies – the last time she'd had to do that she'd almost failed, and failure was not an option. It hadn't been in the Red Room, and it never would be for Natasha Romanoff, no matter what name she was going by.

A quick glance into the bedroom showed that her mark was starting to show signs of waking up. Putting the scissors down, Natasha grabbed at the cigarette and carefully tapped the loose ash into the sink. Cleaning up took less than a minute, and she slipped back into the bedroom, sliding into bed.

"Tell me," she purred into his ear, cigarette smoke circling in the breeze from the window. "Tell me a story."


	5. Chapter 5

Birthdays aren't always appreciated. Thanks to the folks over at The Beta Branch for the beta reads.

* * *

Bruce stopped short when he entered the room. Balloons, party hats, and a banner strung across one wall suggested that somebody had been at it again. He was afraid to see what the cake looked like.

He'd thought he had kept it secret. But, he reminded himself, there were times that the word "secret" meant "only about 20 people knew it instead of 50," and the little things like birthdays fell under that category.

Bruce had never really seen the point of birthdays once he had turned 21. So he made it through another year, that didn't mean that he wanted to _celebrate_ that fact. Or if he did – the first couple years after the Other Guy had come out seemed to have been important – he preferred to keep it simple and quiet. Just a small treat of some sort that he'd normally turn down.

Before he could turn around and make his retreat, though, people had seen him and started singing. That song was another thing that Bruce couldn't see the point of, especially once people hit adulthood, and the urge to leave grew even more. He also hated the fact that they were singing at him, and he throttled his mild annoyance at the situation back to where it belonged. He hoped that it hadn't shown on his face.

When the singing stopped, Bruce nodded. "Thanks, I think." He just had to keep reminding himself that at the end of the day, this was only an hour or two out of his entire life, and everybody looked so happy. Why destroy their enjoyment and their traditions with his personal desires? With a sigh, he moved forward into the room and accepted the slice of cake he was handed with a sharp nod. Maybe he could goad one of the scientists he saw into an argument with Tony and slip out during the resulting chaos. Or…no. There was Barton, back to the wall. He'd be a better accomplice, with or without his knowledge.


End file.
